Novelist & screenwriter

Slightly tweaked The Vanity Game cover

Breaking news… The Vanity Game will now not only be issued with pink lettering on the cover but also a fabulous quite from best-selling and incredibly cool US author Megan Abbott.

Here is what Ms. Abbott said in full:

“As black as black comedies come and twice as audacious, HJ Hampson’s The Vanity Game eviscerates celebrity culture with the incisiveness of an expert surgeon—but with a giddy, over-the-top pleasure that’s exhilarating.”— Megan Abbott, bestselling author of The End of Everything and just-published Dare Me

And below is the lovely new cover.

Why change from red to pink you may wonder? When we were initially discussing designs for the cover I said how much I liked the posters for the movie Drive… not just ‘cos Ryan Gosling looks rather sexy in that white jacket, but for the use of pink lettering for an edgy, violent movie. As The Vanity Game is rather edgy and violent too, I wondered if pink lettering would work for the book cover as well. We played around with designs, but couldn’t get it work right, so we decided to go with that reliable combination of black, white and red.

However, the cover was re-tweaked for the print give-away competition and so Blasted Heath’s marketing guru Kyle, and cover designer J.T Lindroos, decided to revisit the pink idea. This coincided with me seeing a short trailer for the Cronenburg movie, Cosmopolis, which used pastel-coloured lettering. Again, this is a movie about a dysfunctional male protagonist.

Being a bit of a geek for fonts and stuff, I find it kind of interesting that these two movies have used what I would hesitantly call ‘feminine’ colours in their branding.

Anyway, we decided that the pink works too for The Vanity Game, now also with more high-res cocaine, which I’m sure everyone will appreciate: